Posted on 12/14/2018 7:25:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
When yet another Christian celebrity fails to give a straight answer on a hot-button moral issue, it reveals a deeper problem.
Back in September, an article in Rolling Stone announced, “A Christian Singer is Bigger than Drake and Arianna Grande this Week.” That singer is Lauren Daigle, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter whose brilliant voice, soulful style, and hope-filled lyrics has won fans well beyond the Contemporary Christian genre. She’s becoming a regular on talk shows and in national publications, and has officially earned the coveted status of “crossover artist” at just 27 years old.
But with broader appeal comes a challenge: maintaining one’s identity, not as a “Christian singer,” but as a Christian. Sadly, it’s a challenge many Christian celebrities have struggled to handle.
Last week during an interview with iHeart radio, Daigle was asked, given her recent appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show, whether she believes homosexuality is a sin.
“I can’t honestly answer that,” Daigle replied. “I have too many people that I love, and they are homosexuals.”
She went on to explain that since she’s not God, she can’t say one way or another. Instead, people should just “read the Bible and find out” for themselves.
Now let me say from the beginning here I understand how hard this high-pressure situation can be. For a young woman like Daigle with a skyrocketing career, calling homosexuality a sin in a public forum could mean closing a lot of doors and alienating a lot of fans. There’s a real cost that comes with taking a stand for the Christian view of sex and marriage. Deciding to pay that price in a split second with a microphone shoved in your face is something better-trained theologians and pastors have failed to do.
But this whole story reveals something else—the deep crisis of authority plaguing evangelicalism right now. First, we should be past the point of answering this question, because the Christian view of sex and marriage should be so clear and our commitment to it should be so well-known by now that there should be no longer any point in asking the question!
The reason it still comes up is that too many evangelicals, like mainline Protestant liberals before them, have sounded an uncertain note on this topic. I’m not just talking about those very few pastors and writers who’ve reinvented their faith to accommodate LGBT theology. I’m talking about the epidemic fear to even broach the topic in so many evangelical churches and ministries, and how we’ve avoided the topic especially with our young people, instead wrongly catechizing them to look to their emotions for truth instead.
Neither the Bible nor nearly two millennia of Christian teaching are at any level ambiguous about homosexual behavior. Numerous passages in the Old and New Testaments condemn it, along with any sexual behavior outside of God’s good design for marriage between a man and a woman. No one in Christian history ever doubted this until about five minutes ago. There is no room for disagreement on the point.
For Daigle or any other Christian for that matter to publicly say, “I don’t know whether homosexuality is a sin” is like saying “I don’t know whether stealing or worshipping false gods are sins.”
And that brings up a second angle on the church-wide authority problem we face. When theological training is de-prioritized and even avoided, then our celebrities become our experts. Yes, Daigle should know better. But we should know better than to hold celebrities up as theological authorities.
And finally, we need to ask ourselves: How would we respond in Lauren Daigle’s situation? You might think, well, I’m not a celebrity. But it’s not just celebrities that will be faced with this question in awkward situations.
What will you say when someone with the power to seriously damage your career asks you what you think about a culturally popular sin? For that matter, what will you say at Christmas dinner when that one relative—maybe a relative who identifies as gay—asks you the same question?
There are no easy answers in that moment. But that doesn’t mean there are no right answers.
Come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary, and we’ll link you to some resources that will help you answer this tough question boldly and lovingly, no matter who’s asking.
“God made the call years ago - your argument is with Him.”
Filing that away to use at some point in the future after I make a comment about how we’ve allowed “the love that can’t speak its name” to be plastered all over every media outlet so you can’t even escape it.
Example: last night’s “Great American Christmas Baking Contest” featured one homo contestant kissing his “husband” in the opening video and another homo contestant who was eliminated in the second hour just had to tell us he was going home to snuggle with his “husband” to get over the loss. What in the Sam Hill does putting this into the program have to do with baking?? Of course, I know the answer lies behind the cameras with all the fruits on the production staff wanting to be sure to push this out on the airwaves. It’s not like we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves from the faggot bakers’ manner of speech and prancing all over the set.
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Your comparison is flawed; Islam simply has no relationship to the state of Christianity in this regard.
Visit many of the ME Islamic tribal environments and notice the almost institutionalized, albeit informal, custom of homosexuality. Also notice the way males in such societies, if not the religion, often treat the females, surgically and otherwise. Two dots easily connected.
Pro tip: Providing a list of volunteers to security staff ahead of time works wonders. Any ways, her tour complained to the promoter that our staff was “rude” to her volunteers.
Perfect post.
Hopefully she learned 2 lesson from all of this. 1. The world is not your friend. Don’t go on these shows unless you are prepared to play their games. 2. Go to a good Bible believing/teaching church and learn about your faith. If she does this she will discover how true #1 is.
You say that you like her answer to the question but you left off the first part of her answer. Here it is. Do you agree with this? I certainly don’t. It’s a flat-out lie.
I can’t honestly answer that,” Daigle replied
She’s reading a different Bible that I’ve read if she can’t ‘honestly’ answer that question. It doesn’t mean that she has to be rude and disrespectful. And it also doesn’t mean that you have to approve of her lie for an answer.
It’s all about the $$$$$. She knows God’s directives written clearly in the Bible. She doesn’t want to hurt her earning potential. We all have choices and she just made hers. Too bad.
Or, she could be telling the truth. She may not actually know what the Bible says.
But at least she knows that the answer is contained in there.
So I’m not sure I would impute ill will to her. Given the state of Biblical and theological literacy among even Bible believing Christians, she might well be telling the truth. She may not know.
Ellen and the rest of the gay show business world is the real enemy here. Ellen shouldn’t be asking these questions, and as I’ve said above, we shouldn’t play by Ellen’s rules because we don’t owe her anything since she’s not asking in good faith. She’s trying to pharasaically set a trap.
Now all that said, as I already posted, I don’t like that she says she doesn’t know. I like that she points to the Bible. (But I’m not willing to say that she lied. She likely doesn’t know, and like all of us, we come to the Bible with our own assumptions about how the world is and how God is, and then the Bible corrects us).
Just a thought. :)
That’s an important, multi-faceted, very deep and very important nuance. (While remembering that in some sense, Romans 1 is also in play here....).
Totally agree. Islam is actually very gay. It’s sickening, really, and all of this is absolutely related to the totalitarian nature of it, and their utter hatred of women.
In the U.S., the 20th Century was a period of an accelerating embrace of American culture by the Catholic Church. I can say without any hesitation that it was an unmitigated disaster for both the Catholic Church and for America.
As evidence, I simply point at the U.S. map for every presidential election over the last 25 years. Almost without exception, the areas dominated by Catholic voters are the ones that have predictably supported the candidate who is the vocal public champion for every abomination that has destroyed our social order.
No offense, and pardon my French ... but if you have any sense of morals and decency, please turn off the f#%&ing television and throw it in the trash ASAP.
That may be the Divine purpose of Islam, in fact. Radical Muslims are going to make the West Christian again.
right, good point.
Would you regard the closure of the film standards offices (I forget the name of the agency) in Hollywood as sort of a surrender by Catholics? When I think of the more moral presence of that era, I do tend to associate the good with Catholicism....and then...it’s gone. Wasn’t Frank Capra Catholic?
In any event...I think the perhaps a study of American Catholicism in the 20th century alongside the decline of the moral standards in America at the same time period might be informative. Then of course there’s Vatican II and everything accelerates, that much is indisputable....
John F. Kennedy was the first "Catholic" president of the United States.
If that guy had been arrested and charged with harboring Catholic sentiments, there wouldn't have been enough evidence to convict him.
I guess RFK had a bunch of kids.....lol.
“Would you regard the closure of the film standards offices (I forget the name of the agency)”
—
The Hays Code.
.
thanks. good recall there!
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